Social Media Strategy Review: L'Oreal Paris India

This review is a part of our ‘Social Media Strategy Review’ series where we do a 360 degree analysis of a brand’s entire social media activity. You can read the reviews of more brands here.

Like an old grandma, even at the age of 106, L'Oreal Paris shares beauty and personal care solutions and secrets, trusted by millions of users all over the world.

The solutions which come both in the form of products and advices have many users in the country as well, and since social media has become such a huge thing in India, it becomes natural for a brand like L'Oreal Paris India to use this medium to share its expertise with its ardent followers and help them groom themselves, "Because you're worth it!" as the brand puts it.

Audience Analysis of L'Oreal Paris India

For a brand dealing with beauty products, it is perfectly normal to see such a huge female fan following in social media as is enjoyed by L'Oreal Paris India.  A large portion of L'Oreal's customers are women and they have been active and conversant on L'Oreal's Page. It is obvious that the sentiments expressed in the replies of posts made are done predominantly by a female audience.

The demographic analysis of social media fans of the brand suggested that the older a person gets, the closer he or she comes to the brand. As you can see in the following image, it is the 40+ group that eats up the largest share of the pie, and if we include 31-40, which covers 30.13% of the pie, than the picture looks more skewed towards older fans. It's interesting to note that the smallest piece belongs to people between 13-20 years of age.

Does it mean that L'Oreal is being used more to stop or hide aging and less for enhancing one's beauty? I'll leave this one for you to debate, while I move forward to see how the brand does on individual social media platforms, and by studying Facebook and Twitter to that end.

Source: Simplify360 - A Social Media Analytics Tool

Overall Strategy

Fashion is not worth following if it is not “In”. L'Oreal Paris India understands this fact and it keeps up with the recent trends and happenings, which can be seen in the posts it make on its Facebook wall and Twitter stream (see the image below).

For a beauty product, it is very important to appear hip and fashionable, and for the brand to be the leader in the category, it is important that it connects with people and share insights, which should look trendy and friendly and not as if its coming from an authorial position. L'Oreal Paris India has embraced these guidelines in the content it shared and the interaction it sought from its fans and followers.

L'Oreal Paris India on Facebook

The main focus of Loreal Paris India's Facebook page appears to be the style guru for its more than 1.7 million fans. The brand wants to stay true to the mantra of “looking good” because it is there that its market lies, and there is no better way to do so than to share tips and take cues from Bollywood (see images below).

Along with sharing beauty tips, which is focused towards increasing the consumption of its products, the brand also shares fashion tips which are only tangentially related to its products (see the image below).

Lo'real Paris has already started Facebook Hashtags. This is increasing the page engagement day by day.

The page has also made a wonderful use of its cover page and profile picture, which it changes regularly to match with the running promotion or event. The admins also use a welcome post for each month, which is an idea worth stealing (see image below).

The brand relies heavily on the signs and symbols of popular culture like Bollywood styles over the years, celebrity’s makeup secrets, images of decked-up celebrities, weddings, etc. and rightly so. This drives the engagement upwards, as you can see in the image below.

Source: Simplify360 - A Social Media Analytics Tool

But most of the events of engagement are of “Likes” (see the image below), which is not as active as are the comments and shares. It means that Facebook fans of L'Oreal Paris India may approve of the posts on the brand’s wall, but they are hungry for excitement.

Source: Simplify360 - A Social Media Analytics Tool

L'Oreal Paris India on Twitter

On Twitter, L'Oreal Paris India is more concerned about promoting its Colour Genius mobile app and hosting contests (see images below) than sharing beauty tips or any other types of content, of which not a lot is present.

On the face of it, this appears to be a good strategy to create a buzz in the twitter-verse. These contests and promotions are largely targeted towards generating a buzz and creating offline word-of-mouth promotion for the brand. Sharing free gifts that people can touch and feel is a big word-of-mouth communication driver.

If this was the goal, then the brand has done well, using Twitter for this purpose and not Facebook, as the amplification power of the micro-blogging website is huge. But the brand should also have used Twitter to bring people to its Facebook page, where these followers (and winners of the contests) could have generated personalized recommendation, many of which would have led to further sales.

L'Oreal recently did a campaign around Cannes Festival. A virtual red carpet was spread all the way from India to Cannes. Fans across the official L’Oreal Paris India social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest had to cover the distance in just 10 days in order to gain access to exclusive coverage from the festival.

Read More : Here

Comparision with Competitor:

Revlon, by far, is the closest competitor to L'Oreal Paris, but in terms of numbers of fans and engagement rate, it falls way behind the studied brand (see the images below). The competitor does not only have fewer fans, but the fan growth rate is also not comparable.

In the paragraphs below the images, I’ll take you to a couple of Facebook posts to see why Revlon has not succeeded in making such an impact.

Source: Simplify360 - A Social Media Analytics Tool

A lack of interesting content and promotional nature of its Facebook posts have created a wall which stops customers to come on the page and talk (see the first image). Instead of promoting its products in almost all its posts, Revlon should focus more on building community.

The page has also failed in creating effective non-product-related posts. As you can see in the second image, the question falls under the genre of movies, and is not very relevant to the brand audience, although they are moviegoers. In order to be successful, non-product-related posts should be tangentially related to the target audience, and not generic like the one posted below.

Conclusion:

L'Oreal Paris India has done a remarkable job in using Facebook and Twitter independently for different purposes. The engagement and buzz it has thus generated is worth praising. But the effort is not flawless.

The social media team of L'Oreal Paris India need to find a way to form a loop to drive fans from one platform to another and eventually help the brand to maximize the reach of their promotions, contests, and engagement efforts. Some more thought needs to be put into the content strategy, and a little bit of consistency is also needed in terms of when to post what. Surprise is good, but not every time, so by following a schedule, the brand can build and channel expectations.

EXPERT VIEW:

L’oreal has done well with its brands engagement and activities on social media. But the big question for any FMCG player is how does this engagement translate into brand Impact and eventually sales. A lot of FMCG players have dabbled with generic tips and content that usually gets higher engagement numbers but does nothing for the brand or the adoption of the products.

So while the brand does fashion updates and even tries to engage with customers with its Stay rooted campaign. Brand oriented engagement vs generic content engagement has a gap. Now the big question for a brand manager is that what should he do in chasing higher engagement and what should he do in chasing brand resonance. This seems to be a clear dilemma for L'Oreal.

It will be interesting to see how the page adapts and grows to engage consumers more around the brand and less around generic updates.

Expert View by Rajiv Dingra Founder & CEO of WATConsult – An Award Winning Social Media Agency.

Analytics support courtesy: Simplify360